Using Metaheuristic Techniques to Optimize the Blood Assignment Problem

This paper presents the use of Meta-heuristic techniques to optimize the Blood Assignment Problem (BAP). The demand for blood is high leading to scarce blood resources and a need to minimize the total amount of blood resources imported from outside. A basic mathematical model has been designed as a good contribution to minimize the total amount of blood imported from outside the system. The problem was modeled as a knapsack problem and two Metaheuristics, Tabu search (TS) and Simulated Annealing (SA) were used separately to solve the problem. A hybrid of TS and SA was also tested. Experimental results show that the hybrid algorithm obtained better results compare to the individual algorithm.